Content marketing

This article category covers blogging and other content marketing strategies for small business.

How to launch a podcast in 1 day

Posted on May 12, 2012 by in Content marketing

After last week’s post Minimum viable product or excellence? I took the MVP concept to the extreme this week by deciding to start a podcast and then 1 day later having it live. Here is how to do it yourself if you want to do the same thing.

Step 1 – Lower your standards

When I do something I always want it to be perfect. The problem is, if I waited for everything to be perfect I would never deliver anything.

When you are dealing with a new medium like podcasting and you are trying to do something on a budget the absolute most important thing is you ship something.

When I look back to my first videos on this site, they are terrible (see WordPress Menus). I knew they were terrible at the time but I put them up anyway. My most recent videos (see tech tips) are significantly better. They still aren’t perfect but the point is when you are doing things yourself it’s impossible to get it right before you start and still deliver something within a reasonable amount of time and budget. It’s much much easier to improve as you go. Read More…

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10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about

Posted on March 27, 2012 by in Content marketing, Misc

I’m not one of those bloggers that believes you have to write to a certain schedule on your blog (i.e. 2 times a week etc). In fact I don’t really enjoy reading, I generally find it boring so when I come across blogs that have been updated regularly with fairly average content they kind of annoy me. That being said there’s not much point in having a blog if you aren’t going to write so it’s always a good idea to have a constant stream of ideas to cover.

Here are 10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about.

Check out replace your brain with Evernote for more on Evernote

1. Use Evernote

No matter where I am, if I ever have an idea to cover on my blog I capture it straight away. If in on my Windows computer at home, my Mac at work, my iPad at the cafe, my iPhone at lunch anywhere I’ve always got all of my notes and I can add ideas to my ‘blog post ideas’ notebook instantly (even if I don’t have internet access). You can use it to add text, add pictures, record yourself talking, take pics of whiteboards etc. The first thing I do when I want to write an article for the blog is go through this notebook in Evernote and pick my best idea or the one that is the most relevant at the time and start there.

At the moment I have 15 ideas in there that I could write about today if I wanted to. For more information specifically on Evernote check out my post called Replace your brain with Evernote.

2. Monitor my email

When you run a business your customers tend to overlap pretty nicely with your audience on your blog. Which means if your customers are asking you questions then it’s likely that the answers to these questions would be interesting to your readers. I’ve written quite a few posts as a result of emails I have received. Sometimes I might write a post instead of a long email reply and just send them a link to the post instead. Other times I’ll email back and then I’ll realise that the content is suitable for a blog post. A few examples of posts I’ve written as a results of questions from clients are:

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Why small businesses should blog

Posted on February 13, 2012 by in Content marketing

Over the next few months I will be writing a comprehensive set of posts on the topic of blogging for business.

These will be put under a new category in the blog called ‘Content Marketing‘ which is all about creating great content and building authority in your industry.

Let’s kick things off with a post on why businesses should blog.

Why blog

There are 3 things that are you almost guaranteed to get as a result of a well executed strategy to start blogging.

  1. You will get more traffic to your site (see companies that blog get 55% more traffic).
  2. Your site will be seen as a higher authority by Google (to summarise this check out SEOMoz’s ranking factors and future SEO report – better content leads to more links, more useful site, higher social media following etc) and you will be elevated in the search results and therefore get more traffic.
  3. You and your business will be seen as a trusted authority by people including potential customers and referrers (build a following and become known as the expert)

From a business point of view I’d summarise these as follows:

Blogging will deliver you more online leads (traffic) and more offline leads (general authority) and give you a bigger group of people to market to which will result in more customers.

In essence the purpose of blogging for business is about getting more customers.

My experience

This is how my site looked before I swapped it to a blog in 2010. It was actually pretty effective but it was sliding down the rankings in Google and I couldn't see how I could continue competing against bigger companies with a sales page type site.

Read More…

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How we built a website for a top 3 iPhone developer

Posted on February 7, 2012 by in Content marketing

18 months ago I decided to stop trying to sell my services and instead try to create useful content that helped people. I did this by transforming my main lead generation site (this one) into a blog covering web topics for small business owners.

Marketing people refer to it as content marketing. The concept is that you create a lot of useful content and you build a following in the area you work in. This is not only useful to build an audience to potentially market to but also because Google is looking for authority and more authority should mean better search engine rankings.

This has certainly been the case for me and my business but there have also been some surprising consequences.

Who is Bolt Creative

Bolt Creative are an award winning San Francisco based independent game company and creator of the massive hit iPhone game “Pocket God”. See this wikipedia entry for more.

Pocket God has sold over 6.5 million units and has spread to other platforms, such as Android, iPad and Facebook.

When Apple announced their 10 billion app downloads Pocket God was 3rd on the list! Here is a screenshot.

Pocket God sitting at number 3 in the Appstore paid apps when Apple announced it's 10 billion app downloads

How they heard of us

Late last year as a result of taking this new approach to marketing I sought out a few other blogs around the world to write articles for.

I created a post on the open source CMS competition between WordPress and Joomla! and Weblogs Tools Collection agreed to publish it for me. The post was called How WordPress Beat Joomla and while it was somewhat controversial it did open up a good discussion on the site and was also translated into Russian! Read More…

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My number 1 secret to building authority online

Posted on January 16, 2012 by in Content marketing

How to build trust and authority online (part 2 of 2)

In part 1 of how to build trust and authority online, I discussed the idea of running a business without advertising. Creating great content, becoming known as the expert in your field by creating a web presence that helps you build trust and authority. Instead of interrupting people who aren’t interested in your services, people come to you because you are the expert!

Sounds good right? But now?

In this post I am going to tell you the number 1 secret I use to build trust and authority online.

But before I do I’m going to fill you in on 5 other ways to build trust and authority online and give you some examples of how I do it in my business. Note these are all ‘online’ things, there are obviously loads of things you can do ‘offline’ that will also build your authority.

1.  Start blogging

I recommend WordPress for blogs

What you are reading right now is an article I have written because I am an active blogger. I have posted over 140 blog posts on my blog A Website Designer (lots more elsewhere).

Blogging has a lot of benefits but from a trust and authority perspective it has enabled me to: Read More…

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